Archive for October 1st, 2008

A Closer Look at FrontPage and Web Hosting

FrontPage is a software technology developed by Microsoft.  The program works as a website creation and management tool, enabling the end-user to author their web pages and design feature-rich sites.  One of the biggest advantages of FrontPage is the fact that it doesn’t require any complex applications or HTML coding.  It does however, have the ability to format and edit HTML.  This is performed from a clean, user-friendly interface the offers the look and feel of the Microsoft Office suite.

Although the FrontPage program is incredibly easy to use, it is packing tons of power and sophistication.  It provides superior authoring capabilities, allowing you to create a range of interactive functions such as hit counters, forms, search boxes and much more.  The best thing is that it doesn’t require any experience with server-side programming.  By simply using the provided drop-down menus and icons, you can easily insert the application of your choice into the web page and allow FrontPage to do the rest.

What is FrontPage Hosting?

FrontPage hosting describes a niche market that offers support for the FrontPage software.  It is run a Windows Server operating system.  In the hosting arena, the program is powered by FrontPage extensions, programming scripts that enable these functions from the server end.

This type of hosting is suited for the webmaster who desires a significant amount of dynamic functions on their site.  FrontPage is ideal for small personal sites and professional sites for large companies alike.

Features

FrontPage 2003 was created to enhance the technology’s functionality in web hosting.  This edition comes with several additional features including an upgraded photo gallery, comprehensive usage analysis reports and instant team sites.  Other features such as the radio buttons, check boxes and drop-down menus make for easy web development regardless of your experience.  An abundance of pre-installed web templates enable quick modification and the web import dialog function allows you to connect to remote sites.  One of FrontPage’s greatest features is the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, which allows to create data-driven sites in HTML or XML.

The WYSIWYG makes hosting with FrontPage a viable option as it allows you to visualize how you want the site to look.  For example, your fronts, colors, photos and layouts can be viewed right as you implement them into the web page.  Unlike freehand coding where too many errors could be critical, FrontPage is very forgiving, making it almost impossible to mess up.  With everything in front of you, edits can be spotted quickly and fixed with ease.  After working with the program for a while, you will be able to create a number of dynamic web pages in minutes.

Hosting Your Site With FrontPage

To be clear, FrontPage hosting is very much like any other hosting service, with the exception that it is able to support various types of extensions.  The program is only effective if the web host provier has the FrontPage extensions installed on their server.  While the technology is very advanced, FrontPage hosting is not very expensive.  You can generally get this feature for around the same price as Windows or Unix plan.